


These are hard times for dreamers

by heavenisalibrary



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Dark!River, F/M, dark darkity dark dark, dark!Doctor, yeah i don't even know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-29
Updated: 2013-07-29
Packaged: 2017-12-21 19:46:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/904168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavenisalibrary/pseuds/heavenisalibrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s drawn River into his gyre just as much as she’s drawn him into hers, and if they’re ruining each other, there’s no one for either of them to blame.</p><p>The flavours of blood and sex mix on his tongue until he can’t distinguish between them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These are hard times for dreamers

**Author's Note:**

> This is a dark!River/Doctor AU where they travel alone together a little too long. Inspired in part by lionofhearts's fanmix on tumblr and spoilersweetie's encouragement. It's not violent enough or anything to merit a warning, but things get a bit weird, so ye be warned.

_The Doctor holds River tightly to him in their borrowed bed in the city they promised to save from the war that threatens to tear the planet apart, his lips pressed to her neck, his limbs tangled with hers._

_“How long will you stay?” he asks softly. Neither of them sleep, not really, but sometimes they pretend for an excuse to hold onto one another — neither the Doctor nor River really know how to be vulnerable, so the more pretense they can build up around it, the better._

_“As long as you need, sweetie.”_

_“Forever,” he says, kissing her neck, “stay forever.”_

_She laughs, the sound low and deep, warming him from the inside out. “You’ll get tired of me if I stay forever. Don’t be silly.”_

***

He pores over a map, moving the pieces that represent hundreds alive around with tense fingers as he tries to think of the best way to gain them ground. He hears her boots against the tiled floor as she paces behind him, restless and frustrated.

“They’ve got to go we-est,” she sing-songs behind him when he shifts a piece to the east.

He drums his fingers against the table, trying not to let the stress get the better of him. “If they go west, River, they’ll die.”

She stops pacing and comes to stand beside him, pressing up against his shoulder; her presence is aggressive and unignorable and for the moment it chafes against his short temper. He feels anger coiling inside of him and knows it’s not even mostly because of her, but he grinds his teeth together as she reaches over him to move the piece to the west like she’d said.

“If they go west, they’ll die,” she agrees, walking two small fingers across the map and grabbing another piece representing even more troops, and bringing it to rest behind the one she’d moved initially. “But eat heavily into the numbers of the enemy troops. If you send more that night, they’ll be unready, resting up after a difficult battle.”

“That first piece isn’t just marble, you know,” he says, his voice tight and taut like a bowstring. He stares at his hands where they’re splayed on the map, watching the muscles in his arms jump where he’s rolled up his shirtsleeves as he continues to contain his frustrations with his wife’s insistence. “It’s thousands of men. It’s three thousand men you’re suggesting I sacrifice.”

“What’s the alternative?”

The Doctor shifts the pieces around to illustrate as he speaks, but as he does he feels her tense beside him, and he smiles a bit grimly at how alike they are — both on edge, both with dangerous tempers, both trying to quell their irritation with the other’s inability to see their side. “Send smaller groups to combat their smaller camps. Pick them off one by one.”

River exhales heavily, and he knows if he looked at her, she’d look furious. “We’d still lose the same number of men. Just slowly, over time. Perhaps we’d lose more — if we send them all now and cut the enemy off at the head, the smaller groups will scatter.”

“Yes, but my way will buy them time,” he says, “they’ve got leave coming up. They have families. They still might die, but if I postpone sending this big group just a month — they’ll have a last meal with their loved ones. That matters.”

“It won’t matter a whit if your sentimentality gets us all killed before they return from leave,” she snaps, and he turns to face her. Her eyes are wide, her nostrils flare, the lines around her mouth are pulled tight. “This could end the war. Now. These men will die, yes, but no more after that — you’re just drawing out the inevitable, and worse, you’re going to sacrifice more people in the long run just to give these particular ones you’ve grown attached to a little extra time. It’s useless. And worse, it’s stupid.”

“River — “

“You forget, Doctor, that I’ve got twice as much knowledge about warfare packed into my brain than you do,” she says, and he has to look away, because sometimes he forgets what she was raised to be, and he likes it better that way. “You’re very clever, dear, and I know you enjoy war but you don’t — “

“I don’t _enjoy_ war — “

“Oh, spare me, sweetie, of course you do. The strategy, the danger, the thrill of the win...” she trails off, smiling slightly and sidling closer to him, arching her back and pressing her chest to his, drawing one finger down the bridge of his nose. He’s caught between being totally enthralled by her and totally disgusted. “You’ll do anything you can to keep your troops alive, but don’t deny you get that deep, dark twinge of pleasure everytime you watch them bow to your will.”

“Stop it,” he murmurs, but she merely presses a kiss to his neck, her hand coming to rest against the other side of his neck and when her nails cut into his skin slightly he barely resists a full-body shudder.

“You stop it,” she says, looking up at him seriously, though her fingers slide back to caress the skin at the nape of his neck, and every hair on his body stands on end. “You don’t have to hide from me, Doctor. We’re the same, after all.”

The Doctor looks away from her, and he hopes it looks like denial, even though he knows she’ll see his guilt. As he looks back to the map, she presses herself against his side, and his mind is split in equal parts between the game — no, he reminds himself, the war — at hand and how warm and alive she feels against him.

“Your way is better,” he says finally, and he knows she’s grinning smugly. River rests her chin on his shoulder, and when he turns to look at her, he feels his world shift a bit. His moral compass is something he’s had to construct on his own over many years, and he’s always careful to point it at the greatest number of lives he can preserve, but over the past few months that they’ve been traveling alone together, he feels the needle coming to rest pointedly at River instead. She leans toward him and kisses his forehead, and he closes his eyes; he’d been about to mention that he doesn’t like it at all, but her lips feel like benediction and so he forgets the thought altogether.

***

__“I won’t get tired of you,” the Doctor says._ _

_“Wait to see what happens here, my love. Then we’ll decide what to do.” She shifts against him, snuggling as close as she can and drawing his arms tighter around her as she hums contentedly, low in her throat._

_He’s quiet for a while, and then: “I would never get tired of you. Even if we were the only ones left in the universe.”_

 

***

On the day that he sends those troops to their deaths, River paces back and forth in their room. She didn’t sleep the night before, and she looks tired and tense. He stops her, hands on her shoulders, and she can barely look at him.

“I don’t like this,” she says, “it’s what needs to be done, but you’ve got to know I don’t like it.”

“Of course not,” he says, kissing her briefly. “I know you don’t. But it’s the right thing to do.” The Doctor forgets, as he says those words, that he’s not nearly sure it’s the right thing to do. He just wants her to relax, just wants her to feel better — his mind gets so caught on consoling River that he forgets about the men they just sent to die, about the fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers who will not make it home for their holiday.

In their room so far from the melee that they can neither hear nor see the lives lost, they’re told that their decision was a good one, that the enemy is undone, and as soon as they’re alone they fall onto the bed in a tangle of pride and limbs and teeth that’s meant to be relief, even though it tastes cold and metallic, bloodlust on their tongues.

 

***

_“Oh, but that would be so dull,” River says, turning over to face him. She traces shapes with her fingertips along his arm, biting her lower lip as she looks at him. He can tell by her immediate smile that his expression is more than a little besotted, but he can’t help it — he doesn’t see her nearly enough. “Just you and me forever? Besides, darling, I’ve got friends and family that need to see me from time to time. Students and co-workers and mentees. And you’ve got the largest family in the universe.”_

_“Silly woman,” he says, leaning forward to kiss her on the nose. “Listing all those people when the only one I want is you.”_

_“You’re getting quite sentimental in your old age.”_

_“You bring out the worst in me,” he says, and she laughs._

***

The next war they find themselves in is more than a little bit their fault, although neither of them mentions it. They’d landed on a planet on the brink of civil war, and if it had been the Doctor’s hand that lit the fuse, well — River doesn’t bother to call him on his little moral ambiguities anymore. She has enough of her own to worry about. He becomes the commander of one side’s army, and she masquerades as his advisor, although she makes most of the calls, in the end.

He stands before a room full of his generals, making demands and handing down orders that he didn’t even bother to question the morality of — he hasn’t seen his troops this time around. He doesn’t know how old they are, what their history is. He doesn’t think about the lives at stake as he watches general after general’s face fall as he sends them to almost certain death. And River paces behind him like a lioness, her heels clicking against the ground, sharp staccato beats that sync to his hearts and to his words until he says something she doesn’t like, and she comes to stand behind him, pressing up against his back in a way that makes him lose his train of thought.

She whispers in his ear, first advice, but her words quickly become kindling to a passion stirring low in his stomach, tingling at the base of his spine; of course he enjoys wars, he knows, even if he’d tried to hide the fact from his wife. He likes the power and the challenge, and even though he still knows the goal is ending the war, he can’t help but enjoy the journey — and there’s nothing wrong with that, says River’s voice in his ear.

“You’re a good man, aren’t you, darling? You won’t lose track of that. You can enjoy the climb even if the peak is the point. And you do, don’t you? You like watching worlds bend to your will, you like draping other people’s timelines over your shoulders like a garland, weaving their possible futures over your head like a crown.”

He keeps giving orders as she whispers in his ear, acutely aware of the press of her body to his back, of the gentle brush of her lips against his neck as she pulls away slightly; he feels her smile against the nape of his neck. She reaches an arm around him to walk her fingers up and down his spine, and it’s a delicious challenge, keeping his mind on the game at hand.

“You feel it, don’t you? How the future shifts at your words — how your words decide the futures of the people under your command, and their families, and their friends, and the children they may have had and the lives they may have touched — it turns your spine into a livewire, makes your blood sing, makes your mind feel open and powerful and your hearts beat stronger in your chest. Oh, Time Lord, can’t you feel the world turn?”

He’s spent so long trying not to admit how much of his adventuring is a thirst for conflict, a love for danger and an innate lust for a challenge — nothing’s ever too hard for him, but sometimes a war, even on a small scale, can be enough to keep him focused and purposed enough that he feels a little less bored. But with River so very like him — knowing that she’s there and that she understands and most of all doesn’t loathe him for it, it’s freeing. He feels parts of him long quelled yawn and stretch at her words and her touch, and the combination of River goading him on, River capitalising on the feelings that have him so strung out, all while he’s exercising the very power that makes both of them wild is so very much that he feels like he might burst out of his skin. As the last of his general files out with his orders in place, he spins around and grips River by the hips, nose-to-nose with her as he backs her into the nearest wall and presses himself to her, head to toe.

“Well hello sweetie,” she murmurs with a broad grin, her hand slipping down to stroke him over his trousers where he’s already hard. He can’t think of anything to say — his head is so full of her and of what they’re doing that it feels fit to burst, and his skin feels hot, scorching where she touches him. He doesn’t kiss her yet, though — his lips are parted, hovering over her open mouth as they pant into each other; her fingers work over the button of his trousers and within seconds she has her hand wrapped around him, gripped tightly and working him over with fingers that know just how he likes to be touched. He closes his eyes and feels her breathy laugh against his lips as he thrusts into her hand, already too far gone to do anything at all — she stops right when the pleasure nearly becomes too much, though, and shoves him roughly backward. He trips and falls, blinking up at her from where he sits on the ground beneath her, his cock straining toward her, but for a moment she doesn’t move. She stands over him, hands on hips, her lips curved in a wicked smile that he simultaneously hates and loves.

“River —” he starts, but he doesn’t know what he wants to say. She laughs again, and the sound rubs up against him like sandpaper, leaving him feeling raw and exposed and at her mercy — but then, he thinks, hasn’t he always been? He’s felt his world shifting these past months, but it’s only in moments like these that he realises his world has been shifting downward with the weight of her; she’s a colossus in his imaginings, twice her actual size and power with words that could raze civilisations and a smile that could inspire someone to fly and turn them to stone in the next instant. She’s too much, and she’s everything, and she’s exactly like him and exactly for him and he’d do anything for her, even if it means dismantling himself stone by stone and rebuilding his person in her image. But then, there’s something narcissistic in that thought, and something terrible, because she’d been built in his image in the first place; it’s a terrible circle, he thinks, and it used to weigh down his soul with such terrible guilt, but now he finds the pain pleasurable.

River finally lowers herself to the ground, shimmying his trousers down his legs and lifting her dress — his hands grip her hips impossibly tightly as she lowers herself onto him. She throws her head back as he fills her, letting out a long, low moan that makes him gasp. As she begins to move he sits up, his hands dancing all along her body, trying to touch as much of her as he can, trying to consume her in handfuls and fistfuls and lungfuls; he pulls her dress from her head and tears her bra from her until she’s naked above him, and the whole time she doesn’t stop moving over him, lifting herself on her strong thighs and then taking him in again, and when he’s satisfied that he can see all of her and lays back, he’s gasping and chanting her name like litany, squeezing her breasts in his hands and clawing at her back and pressing his fingers to the spaces between her ribs like he’s playing a piano. She moans above him, back arching, throwing her head back and moving faster and faster and faster, and he thinks he’s never been so close to the divine as he is when she gets this way.

When she comes, she screams, and he follows a moment after, incoherent in his pleasure. She falls forward, breathing heavily. As she exhales, she places a series of kisses from his jaw down his sternum before finally pressing a kiss to his lips. He feels boneless beneath her.

“This world is a mess,” she murmurs against his mouth. “There’s nothing wrong with fixing it.”

He’s not sure whose conscience she’s trying to soothe, but when she says that they need to fix it, he hears that they need to rule it. He’s not sure if he knows her so well that he can hear even the things she doesn’t say, or if his own thoughts are impressing meaning upon her words. In the end, it doesn’t matter — he and River are one and the same, two terrible gods with blood on their hands and no one to remind them to wash it off.

 

***

_“You love all of those people, Doctor,” River says, and he kisses her to stop her, because yes, of course he loves all of those people, but he doesn’t have the words to explain that he loves her more. He loves her a terrifying, unquantifiable amount. He loves everything she’s been and everything she is and everything she will be — he loves her strength and her weakness, her compassion and her selflessness. He loves that she put herself back together again, but even more he loves that she was broken enough in the first place to understand even the most shadowed corners of his mind._

_“I love all of those people. But if you wanted it to be just us,” he says, “I would leave them all behind without a thought. Just you and me, eh? What do you say, Song?” He’s kidding now, at least a little bit, and is rewarded with a smile._

_“Sounds like a terrible idea,” she says, grin broadening. “Think of the damage we’d do alone.”_

***

It takes years for word to get out. For a while, their reign of terror goes unnoticed. Armies cheer when he and River descend upon them, for the Doctor is a healer and a wiseman and River Song is the greatest warrior known to most planets. After they’re together and alone for a couple of years, however, they step out of the blue box to blank stares and looks of terror.

The first time they have to fight for control, River ties a room full of diplomats to a support beam in the centre of the room. Her physicality is stunning, though he never quite appreciates it until she finds herself a fight — she moves with such grace, especially when she’s fighting, and he finds himself at her side without even thinking to do so the moment she finishes tying the knot. It hadn’t been a difficult scuffle, but when she turns around to face him, there’s a cut that runs the length of her cheek, and blood runs down the side of her face in a thin stream.

River reaches up to wipe it away, but he catches her wrist in his hand, using his other to rest against the uncut side of her face. Her eyes are wide and her breathing heavy with exertion as she looks up at him, and he slowly backs her into the support beam opposite their hostages.

“I love watching you,” he says, his voice low and gravelly as he rubs against her, pinning her arm at her side. She takes a deep, shuddering breath, and he can tell by the twist of her lips that it’s no longer exertion that makes her pant.

“I know,” she says, “I love it when you watch.” She rolls her hips against his, and he groans. Their hostages grumble and yell beneath their gags behind them, and the Doctor doesn’t even think about it; in fact, it makes him press himself more firmly against her. He leans toward her as though he’s going to kiss her, and she parts her lips expectantly, but instead he shifts his mouth to the side and licks along the length of the cut on the side of her face, and the moan it draws from her sings to his bones.

“We’re going to have to call in the generals,” she says, though her voice is high and thin. He releases her wrist to climb a hand up and slide it beneath the waistband of her jodhpurs, sliding them down her legs. “Make it clear who’s in charge now.”

“It can wait,” the Doctor says, sinking to his knees before her. She tugs roughly at his hair, and whenever he looks up at her, her eyes are on their hostages, not him. It shouldn’t thrill him, shouldn’t make him feel awash in the terrible, familiar glow of power, but it does. Sometimes, late at night, he thinks about all the things they’ve done; sometimes, he blames her for what he’s become, for the thrall she has over him, for how easily traveling alone with River made him forget what being a good man feels like. But when he wakes she’s always beside him, and when he looks into her eyes he knows they’re one and the same, knows that this was always the inevitable end, knows that Time Lords were never made to be house pets, and he’s kept too long the company of humans and planet earth. He’s drawn River into his gyre just as much as she’s drawn him into hers, and if they’re ruining each other, there’s no one for either of them to blame.

The flavours of blood and sex mix on his tongue until he can’t distinguish between them.

 

***

_“Damage? Nah, we’d do so many great things,” he says, wrapping his arms around her and tucking her beneath his chin, relishing the warmth of her body against his. “The Doctor and River Song, off to see the universe — sod everyone else.”_

_She laughs again, but her expression is wary as she pushes away from him slightly, looking carefully into his face. She reaches her hands up to trace the familiar lines of his features before placing a soft kiss to the tip of his nose. “You spend so much time enrapturing wide-eyed earth girls and boys, swooping in on young people and showing them the world — you’ve seen the dark things devotion can do. It’s an especially dangerous shade on you.”_

_“Devotion!” he scoffs, rolling his eyes. “Ha.” Of course, she’s right; he’s totally and completely devoted to her, his mind and his two hearts. If she asked, he’d do anything. When she continues to look at him seriously, he reaches over to take her hands in his, upturning her palms and pressing a soft kiss to the warm skin of each. “Devotion is only dangerous with the wrong hands pulling the strings. I’m safe in yours, dear.”_

_“Are you?”_

_“Definitely,” he says, feeling sure to his bones, if not only because she looks so unsure. His need to see River happy and confident and reassured often trumps his better judgment, as her need to see him the same often trumps hers. “You’re the most good person I know.”_

_“And you’re a good man,” she says, so he kisses her, not even thinking that her words were a warning, not a balm.  
_

 

***

“Do you ever feel bad?” she asks, one of the days they watch another world burn.

“No,” he says. “Not anymore.”

“Empathy,” she says, crawling onto his lap and gyrating her hips until his eyes roll back in his head, “is an evolutionary impulse. It lets us imagine what it must be like to be another member of our species or group. Helps keep us all together.” She kisses his neck, and through the window of their tower on a hill he watches flames swallow the city below. “But if something is too far removed from our group — we can’t really empathise, can we? Not completely.” Her teeth skate along his skin, and he reaches a hand beneath her skirt to run the pads of his fingers along her folds. Her breathing hitches, and he furrows his brow, burying his face in her neck as she rides his fingers. “It’s why your average Joe doesn’t go on a killing spree — he can imagine the pain he’d cause to others. Feel it as though it’s his own.”

“What’s your point?”

“You can’t empathise with someone or something unless there’s a point of intersect between you and it — you can have a theory of self, but you can’t have attribution for something so foreign from you. A lion cannot have empathy for an antelope.”

She gasps as he twists his hand just so, and for a moment they’re silent until he catches onto her train of thought. He’s not sure if she’s trying to make herself feel better, or if she’s explaining to him why she doesn’t feel badly for everything they’ve done. “That’s not true,” he says quietly as she disentangles herself from him and stands on quivering legs. The window that looks out onto the battlefield is floor-to-ceiling, and for a moment he loses her face — she’s silhouetted by the flames and explosions, her figure a black, featureless shadow as she shucks off her dress and steps out of her shoes.

“No,” she says quietly as she leans toward him, coming back into focus. Her eyes are on her nimble fingers as she undoes the buttons of his shirt. He wonders briefly when he stopped wearing the bowtie. “That’s not true.”

 

***

  
_When they break apart, he thinks his hearts will burst for how besotted with her he is._

_“Mm, who would’ve thought? Here lies the Doctor, putty in my capable hands,” she says with a wicked grin, and he raises his brows._

_“Capable indeed.” He reaches out to tickle her, delighting in the brief laugh she graces him with, so at odds with her public persona — here, on the nights when they pretend to sleep just to hold one another, she’s a different creature entirely, and he feels his hearts open up to her and pour out. They stay silent for a few moments, the quiet stretching comfortably between them until she finally speaks, her voice quiet and slow and relaxed as she nestles herself against his chest, speaking into his skin._

_“Other than the, you know, war,” River says, “today was a good day.”  
_

 

***

They level futuristic cities and pull the horizon down behind them as they leave. There’s fire on their heels and ice in their eyes and even their laughter sounds old and strange and curdled when they find cause to do so; too-toothy smiles and just enough wildness in their eyes to make everyone look away. The only time they don’t look like monsters is when they look at one another, and everyone notices it — it creeps through the galaxies on the heels of the rumours about them. River Song and the Doctor, once great saviours, now great destroyers, ruthless and violent.

One planet that lasts longer than the others in its galaxy forms a legend about the Doctor and her husband, about how they were so angry and so cruel that they cut out their own hearts and put them in one another’s chests, and now the only thing they can love is the little bit of themselves wedged into the other; when the story finds its way to River and the Doctor, they jettison the planet into the sun and the little bit of truth beneath the fantastic story with it.

They break city after city, planet after planet, galaxy after galaxy — across the universe they watch the lights go out. One day, they’re only ones left, floating in that stolen box in the middle of the black until what’s left of time or space swallows them up and grants the universe peace at last.

 

***

  
_“‘Course it was,” the Doctor agrees, pulling her tighter against him still. “It was me and you, how could it not be a good day? The Doctor and River Song against the universe.”_

_“I thought we were for the universe.”_

_He shrugs. “You know what I meant.”_

_The Doctor feels her nod, and they fall quiet again until she yawns, and he wonders if maybe she’ll fall asleep, just this once._

_“You know what my favourite part of today was?” she says._

_He hums._

_“This,” River says, “me and you, here in the dark, like we’re alone in the universe.”_

_“You and me and the universe. For or against it, I’ll take it as it comes.”_

_“Good lad,” she says quietly, before drifting off to sleep. Tomorrow, he knows, they’ll have to make plans for battle, and he already knows she’ll disagree and want to send troops west immediately. But he’ll worry about it when it comes. They’ll have a spat, make a decision, save the world — they’ve done it a million times before, and it always comes back to this._


End file.
